Are you listening to your hunger cues?

How many of you listen to your bodies hunger cues and stop eating when you are full? Or don't start eating until you feel hungry?

This is a skill that as healthy adults we are not always good at implementing. There are lots of reasons why we don't, but I think a major one is that we eat not only for fuel, but for taste, enjoyment and emotion. Which of course is not always a bad thing, but we need to make sure we are getting the balance right.

Young children are much more in tune with eating for their hunger levels. If you have spent time with them you will notice how some days they may eat much less or much more than usual. They will happily leave food on their plate, yet they are growing and developing. They are listening to their bodies, fuelling themselves with amounts of food they need for that point in time.

This is my nephews plate from lunch yesterday, not much left, but some. He had gone from regularly putting it into his mouth to eat, to just playing with his food and being interested in other things around him - indicating he was done. As an adult, if that was your plate, how many of us would just eat that little bit left on the plate thinking "I'm full, but there is not much left on the plate so i'll eat it anyway" Or as a parent, eat that leftover of the childs plate for no other reason but to finish it.

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If you think you are someone who does not eat to their hunger cues well then I encourage you to practice it.....you don't get good at anything overnight....you need to practice and most likely fail at it a few times before you get it right.

✔️ Take a moment before eating and think about how you feel - are you actually hungry? or are you about to eat for another reason? 
✔️ Reassess that feeling through the meal
✔️ Slow down with your eating you so you can allow your body to realise it is getting fed. It is a complex system and can take 20mins for the feedback loop to get back to your brain. 
✔️ Stop eating when you feel just comfortable (ie hunger cues are gone)
✔️ If you are going through the motions of eating and not enjoying/tasting your food; if you are feeling quite full in the stomach area; if you feel sluggish, you have passed the point of comfortably being full and eaten too much.

Don't feel compelled to continue eating if you have not finished your plate, put it away for later/another meal. If you are regularly not finishing your plate, then you need to reassess how much you are putting on your plate in the first instance.

Go on, give it a go 😀

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